As Bright as Heaven(74)
“I think you should say whatever your heart tells you to say, Mr. Reese,” I respond.
He nods. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Take all the time you need. I’ll wait for you there by the door.” I turn to walk away.
Before I can take a step, a question is off his lips. “How do you do it, Miss Bright? How do you work day after day in this place?” He is looking over at the young girl with the rope burns around her neck. The girl is staring at her hands.
I doubt Mr. Reese is truly expecting an answer, but I offer one anyway. “Because I believe someday, if we work hard enough, we will discover how to help someone like your wife.”
“You really think there’s a cure out there for this?”
I know from reading Sybil’s file that she has been ill for a long time, the first symptoms beginning when she was a new bride five years ago, and that Mr. Reese kept her at home as long as he could. “I do.”
Mr. Reese nods once. “I won’t be long.”
? ? ?
I first wondered what it might be like to study psychiatry when Uncle Fred gave me his anatomy book and showed me his favorite chapter, on neurology. Not long after that day, everyone I knew—including myself—had to scramble to make sense of what the flu and the war had taken from us. Millions upon millions of people had died around the globe from the flu, far more than in the war itself. The simple reclaiming of delight and goodness and joy had been a staggering endeavor that took place inside our minds, in the tangles of neurons that have always distinguished us from brutes and beasts. Our injuries were hidden deep within our psyches. That was where we needed the balm that would heal us.
Papa was the first person I told, in my first year of college, at the age of seventeen. He didn’t think psychiatry was a wise choice for me. Not because he didn’t think I would excel at it but because so few women went into the field of medicine aside from nursing, and fewer still studied psychiatry. He was afraid I would work myself to the bone getting the doctorate only to find I wouldn’t be hired anywhere. My weaker sex is still believed by most to be highly susceptible to fits and hysteria. I, being a woman, had better odds of becoming a future mental patient than of becoming a psychiatrist. I persisted, though, and Papa finally gave me his blessing—but not before he asked me why I wanted to pursue this kind of medicine when there were so many others to choose from.
“I want to understand,” I’d said.
“Understand what?”
“Everything.”
My course of study is nearly over—one year remains—and I am astonished that for all I know now about the human mind, there is so much I don’t know. Dr. Bellfield doesn’t know everything. Nor do Dr. Freud or Dr. Jung or any of the other great minds in the universe who are considered the pioneers of this new field. The human mind is so complex, sometimes it seems the more we study it the less we understand.
Papa is glad that my schooling and residency will soon be complete and I can then concentrate on being properly married off. He doesn’t say it quite like this, but it concerns him that I will be twenty-three in January and I’ve no suitors. Maggie has Palmer Towlerton calling at the house now, and Willa is forever talking about the boys she likes. But I spend all my waking hours at an asylum full of the mentally ill. Not a suitable place to find a husband. Papa’s words, not mine.
It’s not that I don’t want to be married. I do. But I want to experience again that electrified sensation I felt with Gilbert all those years ago, when the way he looked at me made my heart flutter. That feeling had been real and wonderful and different and very new. I had only just started to love Gilbert when the flu snatched him away from me.
I remember what it was like, though. I remember how that sensation swirled inside me for those months I was the new girl and Gilbert was still alive. I knew I had sampled something rare and divine.
I think if Mama were here she’d tell Papa not to worry about me. I have my studies. I have my work. I have Papa and Maggie and Willa and dear Alex. And I have my memories of what that first bloom of romance is like. Sometimes I think I can hear her voice assuring me that she is proud of who I am. Other times I’m convinced it is only my own voice inside, telling me I don’t need anything else—or anyone else—for my life to be complete. I came through the crucible, and it did not reduce me to ashes.
I survived.
CHAPTER 49
Willa
Piano music drifts up from the grate in the sidewalk, faint and airy, as if in a dream. Someone down there below the concrete is practicing. I know the song being played. It’s “What’ll I Do” by Irving Berlin. The grate where the music is coming from leads to a speakeasy far under the city street. A vent has been left open. I crouch on the metal slats and tilt my head toward the darkness while the city’s pace at three thirty in the afternoon swirls about me. Autos, trucks, carts, walkers, strollers, cyclists, and peddlers dash and scurry past. I doubt anyone else hears the music but me.
“What are you doing?” Howie says.
He is a classmate of mine at the academy that Evie and Maggie attended and that Papa has insisted I must also go to. He and I ride the same streetcar to get to class every day, but Howie is lucky. He doesn’t have brilliant older siblings who have gone to the school before him. All right, so only Evie is truly brilliant. But Maggie was no slouch. What she lacked in outright genius, she made up for in determination, or so I hear. My teachers, when they aren’t telling me to hush and pay attention, are probably still trying to figure out how to motivate me to study.